THE RADIUM OF ROMANCE
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing?”
Because, I suppose, there were once two sides to her bread-board,
both of which she used for sketching. She brought the board from the
Fine Arts room at college to her new home, carrying it one day to the
kitchen to try her hand at modeling--in dough. There are several of
her early sketches about the house, of that period prior to the dough,
which show real talent. Her bread, however, had about it the touch of
genius. The loaves grew larger all the time, the bakings more frequent.
The walls of any house are rather quickly covered with pictures, but
there is no bottom to the bread-box. There are still two sides to her
bread-board, and she uses both sides for dough.
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing?
For the far-off, unattained and dim?”
Because, I suppose, time was when I thought of other things than the
price of flour; not because of much money in those times, but because
she made angel-cake most of the time then, and what bread we did eat
was had of the baker; and because the price of flour was then a matter
of course. The price of flour now is a good deal more than a matter of
course, and the price of corn-meal even more than the price of flour;
so that we must count the slices now, and cut them thin.
We shall have angel-cake again, I promise the children, with the
biggest kind of a hole in the middle, giving them a bran muffin to
munch meanwhile, and wondering in my heart if this fight for bread will
ever end in angel-cake.
One can live on potatoes and bran muffins, although there was never any
romance about them, not even during the Great War when Wall Street took
them as collateral. We need cake. I don’t remember that I ever lacked
potatoes as a child, but, as a child, I do remember dancing while the
pickaninnies sang,
“Mammy gwine make some short’nin’, short’nin’,
Mammy gwine make some short’nin’ cake.
Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’, short’nin’,
Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’ cake,”
in an ecstasy of pure delight, which was not remotely induced by common
hunger.
Short’nin’ cake, angel-cake, floating island, coffee jelly--are they
not victuals _spirituels_, drifted deep with frosting, honeyed over
with an amber-beaded sweat, with melting sweetness, insubstantial,
impalpable, ethereal, that vanish into the brain, that thrill along the
nerves, feeding not the body, not the mind, nor yet the spirit, for
these are but three of our four elements--we are also the stuff that
dreams are made of, and we cannot wholly subsist on more material fare.
What makes pie pie is its four-and-twenty-blackbirds. Singing-blackbird
pie is the only pie, whether you make it of apples or rhubarb or
custard or squash, with one crust or two. He dreamed a dream who made
the original pie. And even now I cannot pass a baker in apron and paper
cap without a sense of frostings and méringues--of the white of life
separated from the yolk of life and stirred into a dream. I find the
same touch of romance on many faces, both young and old, as I find it
over the landscape at dusk and dawn, and on certain days even at high
noon.
It was so this morning when a flock of migrating bluebirds went over,
calling down to me. They came out of the dawn, hovered idly over the
barn and the tops of the cedars in the pasture, then faded into the
blue about them and beyond them, where a fleet of great white clouds
was drifting slowly far off to the south. But their plaintive voices
floating down to me I still hear calling, with more yearning than a
man, perhaps, should allow himself to know. For at the first sip of
such sweet misery some poet chides,
“Why thus longing, thus forever sighing
For the far-off, unattained and dim,
While the beautiful, all about us lying,
Offers up its low perpetual hymn?”
As if longing were a weakness and not the heart’s hope; and our
sighing-- Shall I sigh for what I have? Or stop sighing? Some of my
possessions I may well sigh over, but there are very few to sigh for,
seeing none of them are farther off than the barn or the line fence,
except a few books that I have lent my friends, and now and then a few
dollars.
And such is the magic in the morning light that I see the beautiful
all about me lying--in the bend of the road, on the sweep of the
meadow, across the commonplace dooryard asleep in the sun; and such
is the sweet silence of the autumn day that I hear the low perpetual
hymn--in the lingering notes of the bluebirds, in the strumming of the
crickets, in the curving stems of the goldenrods, the loud humming of
the aster-dusted bees, even in the wavering red leaves of the maples
singing in their fall.
It lacks an hour of mail-time, and the newspaper, and the world. The
bluebirds are leaving before the mail-man comes, and everything with
wings is flying with them, or is poised for flight as if there were no
world, except a world for wings.
The day is warm, with little breezes on the wing, hardly larger than
swallows. They stir the grasses of the knoll, and race with them up
the slope, to fly on over the wavy crest, following the bluebirds off
toward the deep-sea spaces among the drifting clouds. And the curving
knoll itself is in motion, a yellow-brown billow heaving against the
moving clouds where they ride along the sky. And over the knoll sweep
the hawking swallows, white bellies and brown and glinting steel-blue
backs aflash in the sun. Winging swallows, winging seeds, winging
winds, winging clouds and spheres, and my own soul winging away into
the beckoning blue where the bluebirds have gone!
But I shall return--to the mail-box on this rural free delivery route,
to the newspaper, to the tariff, to the Turk. The Democratic State
Committee is assembled this day in Springfield. I am not there. I
also ran. I stumped the State for nomination to the National Senate,
and landed here on Mullein Hill, Hingham. Here I set out. Through
many years I have developed the safe habit of returning here. It was
a magical chance Life offered me; a dream of beating the protective
tariff devils. But Mullein Hill is clothed with dreams; and magical
chances make this their stopping-place.
It is certainly true to-day. To begin with, I have this day bought the
field by the side of my house. For all the twenty years of my living
here I have dreamed of this rolling field with its pines and pointed
cedars, and rounded knoll against the sky. Not every day in the autumn
is like this for dreams; not many of them in all the year. I shall be
building fences about the field now for many days; and paying taxes
on the field every day from this time on. There are not many autumn
days like this for dreams. Yet to know one such day, one touched with
this golden melancholy, this sweet unrest and yearning, should it not
outlast the noon, is to know,
“And one thing more that may not be,
Old earth were fair enough for me.”
You say that I am still thinking of the United States Senate. Possibly.
“One thing more that may not be” I must be thinking on, for we all are.
After the nomination comes the election; and what chance has the sworn
enemy of a high protective tariff of election in Massachusetts?
Old Earth is fair enough for me ordinarily, and she is passing fair
to-day. But even the dog, for all his appetite and growing years, is
not always satisfied with bread and play. He clings closer than ever to
me, as if sometimes frightened at inner voices calling him, which, like
deep waters, seem to widen between us, and which no love, though pure
and immeasurable, may be able to cross. He is nothing uncommon as a
dog, except in the size of his spirit and the quality of his love. He
will tackle anything, from a railroad train to a buzzing bumble-bee,
that he imagines has intentions inimical to me; and there is nothing on
the move, either coming or going, quite innocent of such intentions.
Without fear, or awe, or law, he wears his collar, and his license
number, 66, but not as a sign of bondage, for that sign he wears all
over his alert and fearless front. He growls in his sleep before the
fire at ghosts of things that have designs against the house; he risks
his life all day long.
But he reserves a portion of his soul. He will deliberately chew off
his leash at night, and, making sure that nothing stirs about the
helpless house, will steal away to the woods, where he hears the baying
of some spectral pack down the forest’s high-arched halls. I do not
know what the little cross-bred terrier is hunting along the frosted
paths--fox or rabbit or wild mice; I cannot run the cold trails that
are so warm to his nose; but far ahead of his nose lope two panting
hearts, his and mine, following the Gleam.
All dogs are dreamers, travelers by twilight, who wander toward a slow
deferring dawn. They cannot see in the white fire of noon. A lovelier
light, diffused and dim with dusk, is in the eyes of dogs and all dumb
creatures, through which they watch a world of shadows moving with them
like lantern-lighted shapes at night upon a wall.
“Not of the sunlight,
Not of the moonlight,
Not of the starlight,”
is the tender, troubled light in the eyes of dogs.
There is a deposit, an infinitesimal deposit, it may be, of the radium
of romance in the slag of all souls. Call it by other names--optimism,
idealism, religion--you still leave it undefined; an inherent,
essential element, harder to separate from the spiritual dross of us
than radium from its carnotite; a kind of atomic property of the spirit
which breaks up its substance; which ionizes, energizes, and illumines
it.
There may be souls that never knew its power, but I can hardly think
there ever was a soul shut in a cave so darksome, that romance never
entered with its touch of radiance, if only as
“A little glooming light, much like a shade.”
This is the light in the eyes of dogs, the light that birds and
bees follow, and the jellyfish steering round and round his course.
Something like its quivering flame burns down in the green, dismal
depths of the sea; down in the black subliminal depths; and on down in
the heart of the world. For what other light is it, that guides the
herring every spring, in from the ocean up Weymouth Back River? or the
salmon in from the Pacific, up, high up the Columbia to the Snake, and
higher up the Snake into the deep, dark gorges of the Imnaha?
It is now long past October, and where is the bluebird’s mate of
June? She has forgotten him, and is forgotten by him, but he has
not forgotten his dream-of-her; for I saw him in the orchard, while
southward bound, going in and out of the apple-tree holes, the lover
still, the dream-of-her in his heart, holding over from the summer and
coming to meet him ahead of her, down the winter, out of the coming
spring.
The dog and you and I and even the humble toad are dreamers at heart,
all of us, only we are deeper adream than they.
“If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same,”
says Freneau to a flower. Yet the flowers are of the dust that I am
made of, and they too are the stuff of dreams. And the toad under the
kitchen-steps, what he knows of my heart! As if the unrequited pain
of lovers, the sweetest, saddest things of poets, had always been his
portion, and their vague melancholy the only measure of his tremulous
twilight song. When the soft spring dusk has stolen into the young eyes
of the day, as the first shadow of some sweet fear into the startled
eyes of a girl, then out of the hush, quavering through the tender
gloom,
“A voice, a mystery!”
From his earth-hole under the kitchen-steps I have known the toad, by
dint of stretching and hitching up on chance stones, to get nine inches
up, nine inches from the surface of the globe, up on the lowest of the
steps! Yet it is given him to pipe a serenade in the gloaming that no
other lover, bird or poet, ever quite equaled, even when he sang,
“I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night.”
Life is always a romance. There is fire in its heart, even in the three
cold chambers of the toad’s heart; and the light of the fire flickers
fainter than the guttered candle before it will go out. This may not
be “the true light”; yet it lighteth every man that cometh into the
world, every man with a pen, and his brother with a hoe, though they
comprehend it not. One of our poets has written of “The Man With The
Hoe” and left the man out and put only the hoe in the poem. This poet
has written more than he has hoed, I am sure; as the painter of “The
Man with the Hoe” had painted more than he had hoed, I am sure. Here is
a poet who sees no light at all in “The Man with the Hoe,” because that
poet has written more than he has hoed, which is to gather where he
has not strawed. When a hoe looks as black as this to a pen, you will
search the premises of the pen in vain for hoes. I hoe; I know men who
hoe; and none of us knows Mr. Markham’s scarecrow for ourself. Here a
realist sees what another realist thought he saw; as if you could ever
_see_ life!
Life is not what the realist sees, but what the realist is and knows,
plus what the man with the hoe is and knows; and he knows that, if
chained to a pick instead of a hoe, down in the black pit of some
Siberian mine, he could not work life out in the utter dark.
Realism, if not a distortion and a disease, is at best only a
half-truth; and the realist, if more than a medical examiner for his
district, is but the undertaker besides.
Whoever sings a true song, or pens the humblest plodding prose, whether
of Achilles, son of Peleus, or of John Gilley, a milkman down in Maine,
or of the toad, or of the bee, has essentially one story to tell, and
must be a Homer, truly to tell it.
Here on my desk lies the story of John Gilley, and over in the next
farmhouse lingers the unwritten story of another milkman, my neighbor,
Joel Moore; and in the other neighbor-houses live like people--humble,
humdrum country people, with their stories, which, if lighted with
nothing but their own hovering gleam, would glow forever.
The next man I meet would make a book; for either he is, or he knows, a
good-enough story, could I but come by the tale.
O. Henry, pacing the streets in an agony of fear at having run out of
story-matter, is only a case of nerves. The one inexhaustible supply
of matter in the Universe that is of use to man is story-matter; for,
as the first human pair have been a perpetual song and story, so the
last pair shall be the theme for some recording angel, or else they
will leave a diary.
The real ill with literature is writer’s cramp, an inability to seize
the story, all of it, its truth as well as its facts--an ill, not of
too much observation, but of too little imagination. Art does not watch
life and record it. Art loves life and creates it.
“No one knows the stars,” says Stevenson, “who has not slept, as the
French happily put it, _à la belle étoile_. He may know all their
names, and distances, and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
concerns mankind, their serene and gladsome influence on the mind.”
Art and literature have turned scientist of late, as if our
magnitudes, names, and distances, as if the concern of psychologists,
physiologists, ethnologists, criminologists, and pathologists, were the
concern of mankind! These things all belong to the specialists.
What does mankind reck of the revolution of the node and apsides? that
Neptune’s line of apsides completes its revolution in 540,000 years?
Instead of an astronomer, mankind is still the simple shepherd, keeping
watch by night, and all he knows of the stars is that they brood above
the sleeping hills, and now and then, in some holy hush, they sing
together.
Science is concerned with the names, distances, and magnitudes of the
stars; and with problems touching the “intestinal parasites of the
flea.” Art, literature, and religion are concerned only with mankind;
with the elemental, the universal, the eternal; with the dream, the
defeat, the romance of life.
I have much to do with writers--with great writers, could they only
think of something to write about. “There is nothing left,” they cry,
“to write about.” “But here am I. Take me,” I answer. Out come pads
and pencils flying. There is hard looking at me for a moment. Then a
cynical smile. I won’t do. Becky might have done, but Thackeray got
her; just as some one has got everybody! My tribe can never furnish her
like again. Yet my tribe is not infertile; it is Thackeray’s, rather,
that has run out.
A sweet young thing in one of my extension courses, voicing the
literary despair of the class in a poem called “The Fairy Door,” made
this end of the whole matter:
“The world seems black and ugly
When I shut the Fairy Door;
I want to go to Fairyland
And live forever more.”
I was reading this effusion on my way in to college. When I reached the
climax in the stanza,
“The world seems black and ugly”
I thrust the manuscript back into my bag in disgust and turned for
relief to the morning paper. Here--for the young writer was the
daughter of a prominent Bostonian--I saw the announcement of her
engagement to a Chicago man, and I knew, of course, what ailed the
poetry; and I knew the medicine that I should administer.
How far apart literature and life sometimes get! And how much more real
and romantic is ordinary life than ordinary literature!
The girl was to meet me that afternoon in the university extension
lecture. The amphitheater was full of city folk, and there in the
middle of the hall sat the young poet. She was very pretty, one of the
daughters of men still fair. Taking her poem, I read it aloud to that
last stanza, when, turning sharply, and pointing the manuscript hard at
her, I demanded,
“Is this so? Do you want to leave Boston for Fairyland, instead of
Chicago? Do you?”
She was staggered by the suddenness and savageness of it all and rose
to her feet, adorably pink in her confusion, stammering, “No, no, I
beg--of course I--no, I don’t”--by this time so recovered that her
eyes flashed wrath as she dropped to her seat amid the gaping and the
twittering of the class.
“If you don’t mean it,” I demanded, “why in the sacred name of
literature did you write it? Why don’t you ever write what you mean?
And you mean that Boston has suddenly become a back number for
literature; that the literary center has shifted to Chicago--that’s
what you mean. Chicago! the one romantic, fairy-like spot on earth!
Isn’t that what you mean? Then don’t you see how fresh, how thrilling
a theme you have in _your_ Chicago? No one else, perhaps, ever saw
Chicago in quite this rosy, romantic light before.”
Hers is the enduring truth about Chicago; as against that set forth by
Mr. Armour in “The Packers, the Private Car Lines, and the People.”
Here she was, herself the very stuff of the eternal in literature,
and forced to Fairyland for something to write about! Sheer nonsense.
One need not take the wings of the morning to the uttermost sea, or
make one’s bed in Hell for “copy.” Chicago will do--or Boston--or even
Hingham.
To be, if to be only a stock or a stone, beast or bird or man, is to be
a story, while to be any one of my neighbors is to be an epic.
The day we moved out here, before our goods arrived, a strangely
youthful pair, far on in the eighties, struggled up the hill from the
old farm below to greet us. He was clad in overalls and topcoat, and
she in flowers, overflowing from both her arms, and in wild confusion
on the gayest Easter bonnet that ever bloomed.
“How do you do, neighbors!” she began, extending her armfuls of
glorious mountain laurel; “Mr. White and I bring you the welcome of
the Hingham Hills”--Mr. White’s rough old hand grasping mine amid the
blossoms.
“Why,” I cried, “I didn’t know the Hingham Hills could hold such a
welcome. I have tramped the woods about here, but I never found a bunch
of laurel.”
“Ah, you didn’t get into Valley Swamp! Mr. White and I will show you,
won’t we, Georgie? We know where odes hang on hawthorns, don’t we?
We are busy farmers, and you know what farming is; but we have never
ploughed up our poetry-patch, have we, Georgie?”
They never had; nor much of their other ninety-six acres either--the
whole farm a joyous riot of free verse: fences without line or meter:
cattle running where they liked; the farm kit--a mowing machine, a
sulky plough, and a stolid old grindstone--straying romantically about
the shy sweet fields.
It was an ode of a carriage that the spoony old couple went to town in,
with wheels dactylic on one side and iambic on the other, and so broken
a line for a back spring that Mrs. White would slide into Mr. White’s
lap without cæsura or even a punctuation mark to hinder.
I was at the village market one muddy March day, when Cupid and the
old mare, neither wearing blinders, brought this chariot to the curb.
Mr. White, descending to the street, reached up for Mrs. White, who,
giving him both her hands, put out a dainty foot to the carriage-step
and there poised, dismayed at the March mud. Instantly Mr. White,
disengaging one hand, lifted a folded blanket from the seat, shot it
grandly out across the mud, and with a bow as gallant as Sir Walter’s
own, handed the dear old shoes unblemished to the shop.
Eighteen or eighty, it is just the same. Boston or Chicago or Hingham,
it is just the same. White or red or yellow or black, it is just the
same. The radium of romance is mixed with the slag of all our souls.
Here is my colored neighbor down toward the village.
“Hello!” I called to him over the telephone, “aren’t you going to do
that job for me?”
This neighbor is a most useful colored citizen, with a complete line of
avocations, cleaning cesspools nocturnally and on Saturday afternoons
being one of these sporadic and subsidiary callings.
“Hello!” he answered; “I most assuredly am! And exceedingly sorry I am,
too, for this delay.” (He had been coming for one year and six months
now.) “But my business grows enormously. It is really more than I can
administer. The fact is, professor, I must increase my equipment. I
can’t dip any longer. I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a
pump.”
“I am rapidly approaching the proportions of a pump.” Divine! I like
the sound. For it is the true measure of life as set over against that
which life may merely appear to be. To trudge along through life beside
your humble cart of the long-handled dipper, and to know that your
dipper is approaching the proportions of a pump is to know that you are
greater than you know.
I saw yesterday in the Sunday newspaper the lovely face of a girl, who,
“rumor has it,” ran the legend, “will be the next Queen of England.”
She, too, like my colored neighbor, like us all, is approaching the
proportions of a pump. We are all the stuff that pumps and dreams are
made of, and great art, and great literature.
I spoke of Joel Moore here in the next house to me. For twenty-six
years he was chained to a milk-route, covering Lovell’s Corner, East
Weymouth, and our back wood-road; but he always drove it in a trotting
sulky.
From behind the bushes I have seen him calming the leg-weary team as it
labored up the humps in the road, his feet braced, his arms extended to
the slack lines, his eyes fixed on the Judge’s Stand ahead, while he
maneuvered against Ed Geers and Ben Hur and all the Weymouths for the
pole.
He came home in that lumbering, rattling milk-cart as if it wore
winged wheels, and were being drawn by the steeds of Aurora around the
half-mile track at the great Brockton Fair.
It was sixteen years ago that Joel drove home with Flora IV, a black
mare without a leg to stand on, but with a record of 2.12-3/4 There
was large fixing of the little barn for her, and much rubbing-down of
withers.
One day Joel was seen wandering over the knoll here near the house,
kicking stones around. Something was the matter. I sauntered out toward
my barn casually and called to him. Picking up a piece of rock in the
pasture, he staggered with it to the fence, and fixing it into the
wall, said with labored breath, “Flora IV has a foal!” And, lifting
another stone off the wall, for ballast, he strode up the hill and
over, and down to his barn, not knowing the “Magnificat,” it may be,
but singing it in his heart all the way down.
And this happened on the very hill which this day I bought with the
field by the side of the house. Joel owned the field then. But he
longed for a fast horse. I never set my heart on a fast horse; but I
cannot resist a field. I did not covet this field of Joel’s. I merely
dreamed of it as part of my dooryard, and waited--longer than Jacob
waited for Rachel. What a dream she must have been!
But let me come back to Joel and Flora and the foal.
My youngest boy was born that same summer--sixteen years ago--the
double event in Joel’s mind wearing the mixed complexion of twins. He
had had no children till the colt came, and naturally he spoiled her.
She was a willful little thing by inheritance, though--arch, skittish,
and very pretty; and long before she wore shoes had got the petulant
habit of kicking the siding off the barn at any delay of dinner.
She should have been broken by her second birthday, but Joel would take
no risks; and in the third summer, though he “had her used to leather,”
he needed a steady old horse to hitch her with, and she came up to her
fourth birthday untrained. Then, the first time he took her out, she
behaved so badly, and cut herself so, forward, that it was necessary
to turn her loose for months. Then she was sent away to be broken, but
came back a little more willful than ever, and prettier than ever, if
possible.
That winter Joel had to give up his milk-route on account of sickness,
and with the opening of spring got the blacksmith to take the colt in
hand. He took her, and threw her, dislocating her shoulder. Then he
pulled off her new shoes, and she was put into the boxstall to get well.
After that, I don’t know just why, but we talked of other things than
the colt. She kicked a board off the back of the barn one day, sending
a splinter whizzing past my head, but neither of us noticed it. She was
seven years old now, a creature shaped for speed, but Joel was not
strong enough to manage her, and a horse like this could so easily be
harmed. In fact, he never harnessed her again.
I urged him from time to time, with what directness I dared, to let me
take him into the hospital. But he had never left the farm and his wife
alone overnight in all these years. Then one day he sent for me. He
would go, he said, if I could arrange for him.
A March snow lay on the fields the day before he was to go, and
all that day, at odd times, I would see him creeping like a shadow
about his place: to the hen-coops, up to the line fence, out to the
apple tree in the meadow, taking a last look at things. It was quite
impossible for me to work that day.
The next morning the four boys, on their way to school, went down ahead
of me to say good-bye. They filed in, shook hands bravely, fighting
back their tears, and playing fine the game of bluff with him, though
the little fellow, born the summer the colt was born, nearly spoiled it
all. He is a dear impulsive child and had frankly been Joel’s favorite.
“I’ve taken the eveners off the disk harrow,” he was saying as he came
out to the sleigh. “I gave the kittens a bed of fresh rowan. I drove
a nail under the shutter of the can-house, where you can hang the
key. You had better lock up a little till I get back”--his words half
muffled under the big robes of the sleigh.
“I hate to leave home,” he said, as we went along; “but she couldn’t
stand it. She’s not well. It isn’t so bad for me with you along.”
Two or three times he was about to say something else, but felt too
tired. I had him duly entered; introduced him to his surgeon; helped
him to his cot, where a cheery nurse made him easy; then gave him my
hand.
“Good-day,” he said; “I’m going to pay you back some time. Only I
can’t.” He clung a moment longer to me. “I’ve never had many of the
luxuries. I’ve worked hard for all I’ve got--except for the little
colt. She was thrown in. I never fed her a quart of grain--the cleanest
little eater--as fat as butter--and on nothing but roughage all the
time!”
Then, looking me straight in the eye, he said calmly, “You and I know
and the doctors know. But I couldn’t tell her. You tell her. You can.
And tell her I guess she had better sell the little colt.”
He paused a moment. Something yet he wished to say--the thing he had
tried before to say. I hope the Recording Angel took it down, and the
_way_ he said it, down. Not quite daring to look into my eyes, he
asked, wistfully, “You don’t need a fast horse yourself, of course,
having your auto?”
“Yes, I do, Joel,” I answered firmly; “I do need a fast horse. We all
do, or something like that.” And I bent over and kissed him, for his
wife, and for my little boy at home.
There is balm in Gilead; but are there racetracks in Heaven?--and fast
horses there? Perhaps not. But I often wish that I had told Joel I
believed there were. Of course there are. There is romance in Heaven,
and the magical chance of escape there.